Ok, have spent a lot of time at both Sprint stores in our area(corporate and non-corp) and Best Buy Mobile this season since both kids and wife all getting new phones for Christmas. On top of that had issues with daughter's phone that took several trips and a replacement to fix so have had a lot of time sitting and waiting and chatting with phone salespeople and techs.

Some observations:

At BB (according to the salespeople I chatted with) the big-selling Sprint phones are the EVO (our store having hard time keeping it in stock) and the free Optimus which have also been going like hotcakes.

At the corporate Sprint store, the big mover is again the EVO. EVO outselling EPIC 10-1 at their store accourding to tech guy. By my own obersvation on two different occasions, the only non-Android phones the store were "selling" were freebies. Could overhear time and time again, no matter what phone was being looked at, "Is this an android?" If not, they moved on to something that was.

According to a regional Sprint rep I met that services both the area Best Buys and the non-corporate stores "Android saved us. The EVO gets a lot of people in and even if they don't buy an EVO, they walk out with an Android." According to her, this is the best phone selling season they have had in years in our region.

Listened to the lament of a non-corporate Sprint salesperson about how BB is killing their business with the instant rebates vrs. mail in. She herself said there is no logical reason to buy a phone from her store if BB has it in stock.

Customer service much better at both Best Buy and the Corporate store than the non-corp store even though the non-corp is an authorized repair center and much less crowded. Both BB and the Sprint Corporate store have had employees really go out of their way to be helpful and solve our issues. The non-corp store -- not so much.

If having certain issues (problem with a firmware update that locked up the phone), Sprint customer service sending people to our local BB for service -- even if phone was not purchased at BB. BB had up-to-date software to handle the problem that the "official" Sprint repair center did not yet have. Told me to have BB call Sprint up if issue and they would authorize them doing the fix. Did not need to call as turned out BB took care of it.

Split among the Sprint employees as to what phone they like best/use EPIC or EVO. Pretty even it seems. All the tech people I talked with, btw, all are big fans of WebOS, think it is basically better than Android but dissapointed they didnt have phones like EVO/Epic that used it. All of them belived -- but had no real inside info that they parted with -- that Sprint would carry the next-gen Palm phone. They certainly hoped so and agreed with me in waiting until CES to decide if I should switch. That was the tech types, the salespeople thought I should upgrade right away!

thing is 4g is the new cool thing and people will pay 10 dollas for the new cool thing even if it doesn work right. I know my mother in law is one of them. When she wanted a new phone, first thing she says is I want 4g. Every phone, "oh is that 4g" now moms I told you evo and epic are only 4g phones that sprint has!

thing is 4g is the new cool thing and people will pay 10 dollas for the new cool thing even if it doesn work right. I know my mother in law is one of them. When she wanted a new phone, first thing she says is I want 4g. Every phone, "oh is that 4g" now moms I told you evo and epic are only 4g phones that sprint has!

If the next webOS phone can at least match the Evo in specs and come with 4G, it will sell.

Pre 2 has better specs than EVO already. The only thing it is inferior in is screen size and resolution and the front facing camera. 4G antenna is a $10 per month premium and is darn near unusable for these phones due to battery life issues.

If you meant to say a webOS slab device will sell better than the current form factor then I agree. Vertical sliders are not that popular unless they are Dell Venue Pro size

Sapient2k7... up until four days ago, I was a die-hard WebOS fan. Sprint Pre- from day one. I have been patiently waiting... and waiting... and waiting... all the while knowing that since June I have been eligible for an upgrade (gotta love the one-year upgrades!).

Part of me wanted an Evo, most of me wanted a new WebOS phone. Then my daughter's company got her an Evo, and the witch brought it to our house for the weekend.

The short of it is that last Thursday, I got an Evo. Android is hard to get used to once you're so deeply ingrained in WebOS and its simple elegance. As an IT person, I'm happy to tinker with my phone to get it just the way I like it (Thanks again Webos Internalz and all the homebrew community), and Android has that in spades.

Here's what I like about the Evo... The screen size, 4G (I'm in Atlanta where 4g is solid), HDMI out, REMOVABLE STORAGE, front facing camera, and, surprisingly for me, the main (back) camera. That camera is MUCH better than the Pre(et al), auto focus 8 megapixels. When you touch the screen it TAKES THE PICTURE immediately (no lag like on my Pre).

So, Until December 10, 2011 I'm officially an android/Evo guy. Hopefully, on 12/11/2011 I'll be rocking the HP Mansion (or whatever it is at that time).

There are several things I don't like on their phones: Notifications and two email apps (one for gmail, one for everything else) being the biggest ones. Also very true that Android is not as seemless, smooth and elegant as WebOS but I notice that it seems easier for first time smartphone types (in my family at least) to get a workable "hang" of Android than when they played with WebOS. I think what bothers a lot of us is that Android is, in effect, often "dumbed-down" for the lowest common user. Not great for us types maybe but probably good marketing.

BUT, regardless of the merits of the two phones, the point of the post is that Sprint, from my limited sample size, has almost gone "all-in" on Android and has succeeded with that stratigy. I (and the Sprint Techs I have chatted with ) have high hopes that they will carry the next WebOs device (especially if it is 4G -- Doesnt matter if that really should make a difference or not, Sprint is really pushing that as a marketing tool) since they have a large and rabid Palm user base already, but I sure could see Sprint evolving into a place that has the following:

-Top-tier 4G Androids as their flagship
-Mid-Tier Androids for the masss
-One Blackberry just to say they do
-One Windows phone because don't want to not have something from Big Brother.
-A whole lot of rotating flavor-of-the-month free or almost-free phones of several varieties.

In fact, that is just how the Corporate Sprint store has their phones organized. One wall had all the Android phones with "Android powered" and "4G" and "Smartphone" all on big signage, while the other wall held the free and almost free phones with the poor BB sitting alone at the end of the free/cheep phone row. Another thing I noticed, is that this store actually had three live EVOs and two live Epics hooked up for people to play with -- and even with that there was sometimes a bit of a wait to get to one of them. No other phone had more than one example out.

Right now the biggest factor slowly inching me away from webOS and toward Android is what is going on with the apps. Epocrates and Classic are both going away, Skyscape has abandoned any plans for webOS development, iSilo showing no signs of ever coming to webOS, Docs to Go pulling webOS (yes I know QuickOffice is coming, but so is the Rapture), etc. etc. etc.

Ad that to the lack of any apparant commitment to webOS by Sprint and it's rapidly becoming a very depressing picture.

Right now the biggest factor slowly inching me away from webOS and toward Android is what is going on with the apps. Epocrates and Classic are both going away, Skyscape has abandoned any plans for webOS development, iSilo showing no signs of ever coming to webOS, Docs to Go pulling webOS (yes I know QuickOffice is coming, but so is the Rapture), etc. etc. etc.

Ad that to the lack of any apparant commitment to webOS by Sprint and it's rapidly becoming a very depressing picture.

That Rapture App would be great, just be careful about testing the beta, data sometimes does get redirected by mistatke!

There are several things I don't like on their phones: ... two email apps (one for gmail, one for everything else)

You don't have to use the gMail app. On my Incredible, I turned of gMail syncing and setup all my accounts (Exchange, gMail, Yahoo, Hotmail) using the HTC Mail app. This syncs my mail, contacts, and calendar to one place. Also, I can link my Facebook contacts to my HTC Mail contacts - everythink in one place. I can do the samething with pictures on Flickr.

Edit: HTC has a new SenseUI that has a much better unified Mail/Contact/Calendar. This is showing up on newer HTC phones. If older phones are upgraded to Gingerbread, they will have to new SeseUI - the Evo and Incredible will be getting the upgrade.

netflix isn't in the andriod market btw...
and forget all the andriod crap I got my eyes on a new WP7 device all my friends have andriod and iphones and the andriod users think it's soooo great mainly becuz the customization and the apps, which ios and webos can do when rooted jailbroken whateverr... And there really oblivious to webos and think ios is old and dated and they always ask when I'm getting the evo and in my head I'm like I'd stick with my pre over that anyday.. Andriod ******* are the worst ever.... Srry if I'm ranting but they really get on my nervs... Especially when they have no clue about phones just that andriod can do this and that and that's all they care about and will boast about....

Uh, if you are out there trying to be an advocate for webOS..... Don't

I'm looking forward to see how Palm comes back to this one. I loved my Pre, and now love my Evo, and just FYI I'm not a fan boy for either, I like smart phones in general (little biased against Apple but there's other reasons for that). Anywho, I was reading through some articles on Gizmodo, Engadget and Lifehacker and I stumbled across this one.

I hope all this hold out with the "In the coming months" comments from Palm yields a device on par with this type of set up. Can you imagine how fast WebOS would be on this type of hardware? Would be insane (especially as at 1ghz the Pre was very fast). Just wondering anyone else's thoughts on the matter.